Dan Baum, writing in support of drug legalization at Harper’s, has unleashed a frank 1994 quote from former Nixon policy advisor John Ehrlichman, and as inadvertently salient an argument for legalizing drugs as any I’ve ever seen:

1. Star Wars starts out in the Wild West, the rough-hewn old frontier, and then it races upwards, soaring and expanding its scope, until at last it becomes World War II. It’s the story of drifters and dreamers, who find their purpose out in the absolute dead middle of nowhere, and end up leading the Revolution against…

Remember President Ronald Reagan's plan for space weapons in the 1980s? Today, it's little more than a punchline, but it used to be serious business. How serious? Video game serious. Yes, there really was an SDI video game, and thanks to the Internet Archive you can even play it.

Believe it or not, the U.S. government actually spent about $1 billion in the 1980s trying to build a program like Skynet from the
Terminator movies. DARPA — an agency that's sometimes called the "mad science" research arm of the Defense Department — worked on developing driverless vehicles, a pilot's assistant…

The White House gets spectacularly destroyed in Independence Day, one of the most famous movies of Bill Clinton's presidency — but if that happened in real life, Clinton says it could be a good thing, if it finally ended the huge divisions among the human race.

From 1983 to 1993 DARPA spent over $1 billion on a program called the Strategic Computing Initiative. The agency's goal was to push the boundaries of computers, artificial intelligence, and robotics to build something that, in hindsight, looks strikingly similar to the dystopian future of the Terminator movies. They…

During his 1984 State of the Union speech, President Reagan announced that the U.S. would build a new permanently manned space station within a decade. The Space Shuttle program was underway, and a permanent space station seemed like the next logical step in our bold push into the final frontier. It didn't hurt that…

A new technology called cognitive video regeneration has seemingly brought Ronald Reagan back from the dead — a potential glimpse into how politics might be played in the future — if not the present. The technology was developed by a company called Seyyer, who has created the Reagan "Live From the Other Side" series…

On a dark and stormy night, two liberal kids named Brad and Janet seek help at a mansion after their car breaks down. But they quickly discover that the occupants want to seduce them — to become conservatives. That's the premise behind the bizarre Rocky Horror spoof, The Ronnie Horror Picture Show.

In 1984, a young boy named Andy Smith came up with a clever scheme to get his room cleaned with minimal effort: he would convince President Ronald Reagan to have his room declared a federal disaster area and then clean his room with the resulting funds. But the president didn't exactly send folks in biohazard suits to…

Or at least $15,000 for the time being — who knows how high this auction for the Gipper's dried hemoglobin will go? Indeed, someone is selling a sample of Ronald Reagan's blood collected after John Hinckley Jr.'s 1981 assassination attempt.

Not so long ago, right here in our Galaxy, Emperor Ronald Reagan announced the other Star Wars, the Strategic Defense Initiative which started the last phase of the Cold War with the Soviet Union (whom, funnily enough, El Presidente called the Evil Empire.) In these 25 years since his March 23 speech, calling the…